One Of These Things is Not Like the Others

Welcome to the first posting for ABC on line. I hope that you enjoy these entries, and maybe learn a little bit in the mean time.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about there about "sugar". Is it a bad thing or a good thing? What exactly is it? Is High Fructose Corn Syrup an evil conspiracy designed by the major food manufacturers, or can we actually consume it? These and related questions frequently arise with clients when working on nutrition, weight loss or gain, and just better health management. So, let's try and sort this out...

There are Three (3) major groups under which food is generally classified: proteins, fats or carbohydrates.

Sugars are carbohydrates.

Glucose is a simple carbohydrate and is the most important monosaccaride (single sugar) in human metabolism. Glucose is called a simple sugar or a monosaccharide because it is one of the smallest units which has the characteristics of this class of carbohydrates. Glucose is also sometimes called dextrose. Corn syrup is primarily glucose. Glucose is one of the main chemicals which serve as energy sources for plants and animals. It is found in the sap of plants, and is found in the human bloodstream where it is commonly called "blood sugar". The desirable or average concentration of glucose in the blood is about 0.1%, but it can become much higher in persons suffering from diabetes, and much lower in people suffering from hypoglycemia.

In living organisms, the break down of glucose in the presence of oxygen participates in a series of complex biochemical reactions which provides the energy needed by cells, providing warmth to warm blooded animals and the building blocks for many of the puzzle pieces needed to make up out cells.

Fructose, or "fruit sugar" is another sugar found in nature. If glucose had a value of 0.74, fructose would have a value of 1.73. This makes it much sweeter than glucose, but because of the way it is broken down by your body (different class of chemical, still a monosaccaride) it yields a different amount of energy. It's found in sweet things like bananas, apples and honey. All of these things benefit you in a healthy diet for a variety of reasons!

Sucrose, or table sugar, is a combination of these two things hooked together chemically into a di (double) saccaride (sugar). The more refined the sugar, the whiter it is. Super fine sugar, or castor sugar in England, is crushed table sugar. Powdered sugar is just that; dextrose (another name for sucrose) that has been abused to the point that it's been powdered. Another name for powdered sugar is icing sugar. This last one has a small amount of corn powder added to keep the sugar from clumping. On the sweetness scale indicated above, Sucrose is the standard and has a value of 1.00.

If you keep hooking sugars together, you get interesting things like wood (not recommended in the human diet). However, wood is made of cellulose, a long chain carbohydrate (starch) which is a bunch of sugars all hooked together. Humans can't digest this yet, strangely enough, we need some kinds of cellulose (a.k.a fiber) in our diet to be healthy. Go figure.

Other types of sugar are the monosaccarides maltose (from malt, sweetness 0.33) and lactose (from milk, or a 'lactation' product, sweetness 0.16), neither of which we are going to go into in this discussion. If you have a pressing issue with either of these, please comment and, if I get enough responses, I'll be glad to discuss.

OK, now for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). What is that stuff, and where did it come from?

Well, it comes from corn, just like regular corn syrup. It's a purely manufactured product, not a natural sweetener. Just like regular corn syrup, it's made from hard kernels that are separated into their different components (hull, starch, oil) and then the starch component is broken down into glucose. So far, so good, right? Now, here's where you lose me a little; the glucose is chemically treated to invert it (chemically convert it) (glucose and fructose have the same number and type of elements, they're just put together differently) to make some of the glucose molecules fructose. Why? Well, as seen above, fructose is sweeter than glucose. If you have a sweeter substance, you can use less of it in your product to get the same sweetness. If you can use less, you save money. Save money, more profit. It all makes GREAT economic sense. You end up with 42%-55% fructose in your glucose in this product, which drastically increases your sweetness over regular corn syrup. 

Now, here's the rub. The people who manufacture HFCS are truly paranoid about all the bad press their product has received.  They have done SO much research on it's relationship to diabetes, metabolism, allergies, etc. and so have independent researchers that it's impressive. Whereas HFCS is NOT like table sugar, and don't you believe it, it's not a sweetener you need to eliminate from your diet. Then again, it's generally used in products I wouldn't want to pass my lips. Make sure you read the ingredients on ALL packaged foods you buy, but this one wouldn't freak me out (technical language, there).

I hope this has helped you to sort out your sugar questions. Should you still need answers, please comment. Also, if there's a special topic you'd like to have discussed here please put that in the comments section, too.

Always,

Dr. P